The Annotation Bridge is Being Built

As accessing information becomes less challenging for most of the world, new problems emerge. Discovering, evaluating, and most importantly, connecting relevant knowledge is overwhelming. There hasn’t been a way to bridge the chasm between isolated communities with their specific knowledge base and the rest of us – until now!

Hypothes.is launched a mission driven coalition: “annotating all knowledge” and SSRN is proud to be one of the founding members. Their recent blog post states the coalition members “realize that a robust and interoperable conversation layer can transform scholarship, enabling personal note taking, peer review, copy editing, post publication discussion, journal clubs, classroom uses, automated classification, deep linking, and much more.”

Hypothes.is was created to build a layer of conversation over any online content. They are only one of the players in this movement (and very intentionally so). The conversations can be broad or extremely granular but they focus on the content itself instead of the system or tool being used to view and manipulate it. This means Hypothes.is and other platform users are not limited by the functionality, resources, or breadth of a single provider.

Many tools for annotating content already exist in the scholarly world, but none have Hypothes.is’ commitment to interoperability, standardization, or its core element of openness. When Hypothes.is founder Dan Whaley asked me why it needs to be open, I laughed, “How can it not be?”

“How many different companies have failed by trying to commercialize something like this? This is truly a public good. This is something that needs to be funded. … If it’s not interoperable, if it’s not open, it doesn’t work.”

SSRN is eager to work with Hypothes.is to connect scholarly research with a significantly broader audience.